ClearBank expands banking services for Kraken’s UK operations

By Puja Sharma

ClearBank has announced a regional partnership with Kraken, a digital asset platform. Through this extended partnership, ClearBank will provide GBP clearing services to Kraken’s UK-based clients, enabling smooth and secure deposits and withdrawals within the digital asset ecosystem.

Building and maintaining reliable, instant fiat payment rails has been a consistent challenge that has held back digital asset adoption. ClearBank solves this challenge through its direct membership of the Faster Payments Service (FPS) and its virtual International Bank Account Numbers (vIBANs) offering. As such, ClearBank will provide Kraken’s retail and institutional clients seamless on and off ramping, as well as additional security due to its deposits being held at the Bank of England.

With the recent granting of a UK Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence to Kraken’s legal entity, Payward Services Ltd, ClearBank becomes the digital assets platform’s primary UK bank, and will be supporting them as they scale up their UK licence. ClearBank is already supporting Crypto Facilities Limited, an FCA-regulated investment firm also part of the Kraken Group, with client money accounts.

Later this year the partnership will expand further with Kraken’s European EMI entity Payward Ireland Limited set to onboard to ClearBank making it Kraken’s primary clearing bank in the EU region, granting clients access to the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) and opening up GBP and EUR clearing services to both UK and EU-based clients.

“The partnership with Kraken is a demonstration of our ability to provide account and payments services across both the UK and Europe. We now work with some of the largest companies and exchanges in the market and with Kraken, we are pleased to further grow our presence in the rapidly expanding world of digital assets. Both ClearBank and Kraken are culturally aligned and have similar ambitious long-term growth plans, and we look forward to working with them to provide a range of new products and services to further delight their customers.” said John Salter, Chief Customer Officer, ClearBank.